Windows 10 Build 10565 Includes An Early Preview Of Nested Virtualization

Microsoft today revealed that they have included the early preview of nested virtualization in Windows 10 Build 10565 which was released to Windows Insiders couple of days back. This feature virtualizes certain hardware features that are required to run a hypervisor in a virtual machine.

Hyper-V relies on hardware virtualization support (e.g. Intel VT-x and AMD-V) to run virtual machines. Typically, once Hyper-V is installed, the hypervisor hides this capability from guest virtual machines, preventing guests virtual machines from installing Hyper-V (and many other hypervisors, for that matter).

Nested virtualization exposes hardware virtualization support to guest virtual machines. This allows you to install Hyper-V in a guest virtual machine, and create more virtual machines “within” that underlying virtual machine.

Basically, you can have a host machine running a virtual machine, which in turn is running its own guest virtual machine.